Tuesday, November 6, 2012

The wolf pack has moved on

The media are finally losing interest in the Dotcom saga.
It’s no longer generating daily headlines and the journalistic wolf pack has
moved on.

But here’s the thing: the public was never that interested
anyway. To use the fashionable jargon, it was a classic Beltway issue (the
Beltway being the highway that encircles Washington DC, and hence a metaphor
for any issue that excites political obsessives but leaves ordinary citizens
wondering what all the fuss is about).

What made the Dotcom affair particularly riveting for
political junkies was that it implicated normally secretive security agencies –
a rare treat. Better still, it exposed them to embarrassment and ridicule.

Combine the scent of a wounded prime minister’s blood with
the spectacle of panic and discomfort among the "spook" community, to use another
term much loved by reporters, and you have what might crudely be called a
political journalist’s wet dream.

But even if the public had cared much in the first place,
which I doubt, they would have very quickly lost interest as the tangle of allegations
became ever more intricate.

This is not to say the media should have ignored the affair,
especially when a government security agency had flagrantly disregarded the
law. But its significance in the eyes of the public was probably
greatly over-estimated.

Still, there are rich pickings there for anyone interesting
in scripting a political farce. It might be something for my fellow Dominion Post columnist,
the parodist Dave Armstrong, to pursue when he’s not tending his basil plants.

2 comments:

If only you were right Karl Dotcom came up with a loony idea about building a new cable to the US and giving all citizens free internet-all paid for by his legal returns from action against the Hollywood studios.Now putting aside the fact that NZ already has internet capacity for decades to come and that prices are set in Australia,the fact that it came from Dotcom meant it got extensive coverage from TV radio and every newspaper.Others who should have known better( including the millionaires who proposed Pacific Fibre but cleverly wouldn't put their own money into building it) jumped in as well and for a few days it was an issue of discussion.It took a few wiser heads to work out that the chances of the US allowing a cable owned by Dotcom anywhere near their shoreline was less than Xero .

About Me

I am a freelance journalist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.